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Rasterman Summarizes his Red Hat Leave
sRparish writes
"Rasterman has made it to California, and has posted a
very interesting article entitled: Post Mortem and Deliverance "
He expands somewhat on things you've already read here, and
compares his experience at RH to jwz's at Netscape.
Posted by gadflyjones:
I really suggest changing your distro. Personally I just bought SuSE 6.1, and have been very pleased. Most of the system configuration is contained in one file, not in cryptic psuedo-userfriendly program. Not that redhat or any of the other distros suck, it's just that I like to have everything in one place.
Much as I enjoyed your note -- I really did, and I agree with what you say -- I still don't understand your argument about Malda and Debian. But it doesn't really matter. I'm out of the linuxerati stream enough not to have realized that RH has become so unhip that it's now fun to equate them to the Horned One. I was therefore trying to dig up 'political' motives.
To think that nowadays people carry out civil disobediance in the name of an OS.
That's what we call a false dichotomy. You may look that up. I am certain Yahoo! will return a pointer to a page of rhetorical fallacies.
Oh, what the hell:
I did it for you.
I'd also suggest you consider that Buddhism has moments of exquisite attention to detail. You may also want to consider the humility and self-effacement of some of its practitioners, who wouldn't be arrogant enough to expect others to wade through the distraction of their carelessness.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
Speaking from experience, here is where the fact he's using the C language might get to be a problem. Enlightenment is becoming too large, and the fact it's not written in an object oriented language is going to make it much more time consuming to make changes. Given the fact that E seems to be constantly accumulating features, changeability and extensibility are extremely important, and this mandates an object oriented design.
It's certainly possible to write 60k+ line non-OO C programs that are changeable and extensible. But the fact is that even the best C code is probably not going to come anywhere close to a well-designed program that takes advantage of a language with polymorphism and dynamic binding in terms of changability. Countless studies have shown that although you may be able to crank more code out the window initially, it will catch up in the end if your project is going to continue to grow and change. E itself is an example of this -- how many times has it been rewritten from scratch now?
Corporate applications moving really quickly to web interfaces from green screen or platform-specific VisualBasic (etc.) front ends. That means time is money as far as your web browser is concerned. While Netscape/Linux is certainly usable, it's not as fast or stable as Netscape/Win32 or IE. (Stop to pray to the Mozilla gods.)
Think about a corporate call center moving from 5250s to a web/java interface. Your choices are: (1) A "NC" from IBM, (2) A tighly controlled Windows PC, or (3) A tighly controled Linux PC. Unfortuantely, number (2) is winning in many cases.
I looked at the XFMail screen shots, and you're right, it does need a facelift bad. Same goes for Netscape Messenger, which has all the features, it's just kinda clunky. I've looked at KMail and a few others, and it's too bad that everyone is in the progress of trying to reinvent the wheel here.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It gets a 3 (4 at the time I read it) precisely why it says it was moderated up -- insightful. It's possible that not many people would have thought of the "stunt programmer" aspect of the story. It's not like it was marked "informative" so it doesn't have to have any "facts."
You could always write some informative, insightful, or otherwise useful comments yourself so that you get some moderator points and can score comments yourself...
Agreed. E is a fine GUI and anyone who can prove different, bring it to my face, please. Users are no different, matter of factly, probably better than that guy on management.
Ugh. people like that irritate the *uck outta me.
Blessed Be! --"LEVIATHAN"
Lots of people of course have bad taste in their mouth from the poorly designed Windows registry. (Someone should build another database as a front end to the WinRegistry, just so you can find user adjustable settings!)
I think the problem comes in when you are trying to build a slick configuration front end. There's just too many different file formats in
Apparently Apple/Next's NetInfo database allows manual exporting/importing to and from
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
As a Linux user and lover I'm beginning to see the cracks in the Linux community, but I'm not all that convinced that they are bad.
Why do I say that? It's a psychology thing really. People have taken Linux, and elevated it from what it was really good at (a server), and promoted it into a Microsoft Killer. When they did that, they assumed that Linux has to have a single user interface. Linux still has a long ways to go to beat Microsoft at it's game in that respect.
But, here is the clincher. Linux doesn't have to beat Microsoft at it's game. As I write this, the rules are changing. The world isn't just about PC's anymore. A PC is nothing if it can't connect with something. (we all know that, right?) Microsoft Operating systems have always been developed from a standalone PC view, and when they network, they're not particularly good at it.
However, in the new world order, the network will reign supreme. The strength of your OS is judged by what you can connect with and how stable you are. This is where Linux reigns supreme. It connects to just about everything under the Sun out of the box. Linux has already won that round.
Yet, why should we play by MS's rules with one interface for everyone? Does everyone want to drive the same car? Who says we can't win on the desktop with more then one interface? If you get in a Ferrari F50, it's not going to be the same experience/same interface as a Dodge Neon, but... you know what? I'm pretty damn sure that almost everybody could figure out how to drive that Ferrari.
I applaud Red Hat on it's efforts to bring Linux to the business world, yet.... I want the choice to run *my* Linux, the way I want to run it. It's about the users. The users reign supreme in Linux, and I think that's the vision that Red Hat gave up when it started courting the business world.
Anarchy - Used to describe the tension between moral autonomy and political authority
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
My anonymously cowardly thoughts:
Firstly I would like to comment on the cite:
"Given the type of crowd that festers around Raster, I think it in our best interest to just go on with business as usual. It has been clear for awhile that he and his posse were not GNOME supporters, and nothing we"I surely can understand why Raster get's pissed off by this kind of thing. I think it was unfair by the guy who said it to go behind Raster's back like that. And with posse. Wtf? Is it the people on people on #e he is refering to? I can hardly imagine anobody of those to be anti-GNOME, but rather pro GNOME.
While it was unethical by Raster to go public with this kinda thing, hell, who cares about ethics. Wouldn't you be pissed off by a guy who has been talking shit behind your back for about 1 and a 1/2 years. Talking shit behind someones back is unethical in the first place.
Personally I think that GNOME would be better off with a default light gtk based window manager, but not be totally dependent on that wm, so the user still can choose what wm to use. Basically turning E into GNOMEwm is not in the best interest for both E or GNOME. GNOME is better of with a very simple wm if it is to compete with Windows[TM] and KDE. I really think GNOME is better of with a default wm, so we don't need to make simplified E themes and "degrade" E to fit in with GNOME. Also I think that FVWM and the likes are to messy & butt ugly to be used as a default wm. I think RedHat did something wrong, when they included E as the default GNOMEwm in RH 6.0, they basically raped E. And also because E is still under development, I think that gave the user a wrong impression about both E and GNOME, not only one app under devel but two, that is bound to make a disaster. I think that in the starting phase of the Linux Desktop reveloution, we should not flame each other to death over mistakes like this. Surely RedHat will learn something about this and *hopefully* doing it right the second time. Maybe now we will have a gtk based GNOMEwm instead...
This is becuase E is something of it's own. It's so much more. It shouldn't be unseperately tied to GNOME, but that doesn't mean it is *anti* GNOME. For me E represents a kind of graphical user interface that I would very much like to see finished. Yes I like the Eyecandy, yes I like it's configurability and innovation. And while people may say it is bloatware, then don't use it, use something else. And I wouldn't want E to change into GNOMEwm I want E. I like both E, the GTK widget set and GNOME, and i will happily use both GNOME with this simple GTK based GNOMEwm. And When I am in the mood for E, I will just switch to E. Who said you gotta just use one environment.
And while the latest events are sad. In the end RedHat will also benefit by this, Now RedHat will probably use something else for a default GNOMEwm and the Windows[Tm] users migrating to Linux will be happy. But RedHat will also benefit from the development of E, This revelutionary user interface (yes i say revelutionary, please tell me about something else with the coolness factor E currently has, without mentioning Window Maker off course) will also draw new users to Linux. I know this, It was screenshots of E that made me try Linux for the first time! And through the beatiful exterior of E, I also found out (after poking a lot around) that hey I like the interior as well, I like the kernel, I like the GPL & GNU philosophy, I like the stabiliy, I like the command line interface (and this coming from an old Amiga user, MCSE who don't like MS products and therefore have no job :P ) Now I find myself using, GNOME, E, Window Maker, hell I can't decide. I Like them all, and I am even if i don't use it, I am still impressed with KDE.
I Support Raster & Mandrake... And I also support RedHat I don't like all the negative press they are getting lately, I think people are getting paranoid, but only time will show.
Sorry about the english, I am *.no
Anonymous Cowardoh come on... don't moderate this..
its made in jest, funny as hell, takes like 4 lines on the page.
Rob Malda, CmdrTaco, when you grep the pages, kick this moderators ass.
Earn cash in your spare time! Blackmail your friends!
Slashdot's main articles are already moderated. You are the moderator. Through "preferences" you have the ability to kill the category what is unlikely to be of interest. It is more accurate, therefore, to rephrase the question and ask whether this article is worthy to be in category "Enlightement". I think it is.
It's Festus.
Can't remember the actors name though.
Go figure.
I don't think it's entirely accidental that /. has mounted a steady barrage of anti-RH criticism lately (only tempered by the Icaza piece). I think Malda should investgate his subjective motives here -- perhaps he's pissed that for regulatory reasons RH needs to excise references to itself in its Slashdot links?
Hopefully Raster can find a job somewhere that will support his efforts more whole-heartedly.
No need for a resume, just a URL !
Posted by d106ene5:
Is it really that interesting as to why this guy quit his job?
It seems like we're really obsessing over what is largely a personal matter. I have no idea why these people set up rant pages when they leave their jobs. How tacky.
JWZ was one thing -- his complaints at least were about the project. He was expecting to "ship product" in a year, and was entitled to gripe about how slow things were going when it didn't (although personally I can't imagine how Mozilla could have turned around that fast given how broken the original code was).
JWZ's gripes were over the lack of progress in a public effort. Raster's bitching about how he couldn't get along with someone else at the office is something else entirely.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Seriously, my co-workers are nothing short of the smartest, hardest working people I know, I'm proud to work here. You are, to put it simply, wrong.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
We need a way to moderate the stories themselves. That way we can downplay stories like this (which aren't truly all that relevant to the general populace..)
/. giving it "column-inches") is highly inappropriate.
/. ?
Reality Check -- EVERYONE here has probably quit their job at one point in time or another because they didn't like someone they worked with. I know I have. Sure I may have had a web page up about it at one point in time, but I certainly didn't go telling the world about it, putting it in Slashdot, because frankly its not that important. If someone knew me, came to my web page, they saw it and understood why I moved from one city to another.
Yes, I can understand Raster's complaint.
No, I don't want to hear any more about it.
Even if I do dislike Red Hat as a company, which I do, this type of ranting (and
Which leads back to moderation.... how about stories themselves start out with points that moderators can reduce if the story just completely shouldn't be on
Now enlightenment has undergone a rewrite, supposedly to remove a lot of cruft and make it more extensible. When I first used E, it was more of a desktop than simply a window manager; making it a window manager again, albeit a very advanced and complex one, seemed like a good idea to me.
E's pagers, the minisnapshots, are neat. The fact that it is completely configurable is neat. But, it's not a window manager any longer. I first got concerned when Raster talked of implementing his own widgets in E for configuration; after all, there's a perfectly good GTK+ app that could be extended or rewritten to do the same thing! When Raster went on to say he might want a file dialogue or something along those lines, I knew that E was getting a bit too big.
E is now, or will soon be, a desktop environment unto itself. It's running up in the 60k lines of code area, with 0.15 at least, which if it's done well isn't a problem. Regardless of this, small machines will have a lot of trouble running E if it continues to expand. The only hope of keeping it as a window manager is that Mandrake is able to make modules of one form or another work, so that if I want to use the GTK+ app instead of the built-in E widget configuration dialogues, I can, and if I don't want the up-and-coming desktop environment bits of it, I can leave them and use GNOME and gmc instead.
There's nothing inherently wrong in making E a desktop environment on its own. But, with it being GNOME's default window manager, the GNOME developers now have a choice: Use the old versions of E, which aren't duplicating code and effort, use the new versions and hope that the user doesn't get confused with the two file selectors and various other things, develop their own window manager, or make sure that E follows its true roots: complete configurability, modularity, and choice.
articles that have appeared over the last few
days here and elsewhere, both positive and
and negative, seem to point that RedHat is
pushing the limits of what it can do under it's
current model, and must make major changes to
the way it does things if they wish to continue,
either as a packager of a quality distribution,
or as a supplier of Linux to businesses. (IMO,
with the convoluted process of Linux install,
you can't provide both in the same package).
In this case, RH is definitely heading down the
road of business attraction (IPO, anyone) and
moving away from general Linux support, even
though they are continuing to push their RHAD
stuff. This is making the distribution less
interesting to those that prefer to hack
someone on the system or do more non-standard
setups.
Mind you, RH aiming to provide a strong linux
distrubtion to businesses is a *GOOD* thing
to break the NT juggernaut, but they need to
decide to truly go down this road, rather than
trying to supply a tool that inadequetely does
both the business and the hacker support.
Myself, I'm strongly considering going to
debian when I next need to upgrade, only because
it has more of a hackers-to-hackers feel to
it.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Given the type of crowd that festers around Raster's proclaimations of disgruntledness, I think it's best for all of us to just carry on and ignore them. I think it's clear to most of us that these people a have nothing to offer us, and that nothing we say can make them stop whining.
:)
I love this... "Type" of crowd.
Yet the same person who does this is probably whining and bitching when someone typecasts the linux community as a whole.
I've talked to the crowd that hangs out in #e, which I what I imagine you refer to. If "type" means anything that is applicable to these people, I would say that they are linux users, as there's not much more you can add to typecast such a large group.
Granted, I agree with a lot of people and think that he's whining, as this kind of shit happens whenever you leave any job. You find out who were your friends while you were working there, and those other people that were pretending to be your friends.
As for RedHat, I think that raster is making a good point, if not directly. His point is that within a good portion of the linux community, he is an icon. In a lot of ways, he embodies the more rebellious strain of hacker culture.
I think in a lot of ways, RedHat used raster more as a celebrity than a programmer, to attract attention to RHAD labs and GNOME. Once the attraction was not needed anymore, they found a way to get him to remove himself.
After all, if raster was fired from redhat, wouldn't we have a shitload of messages here about how everyone thinks redhat doesn't support programmers and free software?
I'm not saying RedHat is evil, I'm just saying that they are trying to seperate themselves from the culture. They want to make money, not friends anymore, as they have enough friends. You know, friends like Intel, HP... You get the idea.
-Erik-
Have you used E? I have. Mind you, I don't think that it's perfect. Its documentation is poor, and I think that it makes some things theme-dependent that should persist across themes, like buttons. I've found E to be fairly stable, though. Raster's idea of 0.15.5 is some people's idea of 1.0.
Hey, let's be frank here... I think everyone at one point in time or another has left a job for some reason or another. If you haven't, then you are either very lucky or very meek, and enjoy being walked on.
From what I have ascertained, Raster was, in fact, being walked on by someone else. This someone else held a more concrete position in the company than him. Also, given the evidence, I would have to say that this employee was genuinely hostile toward Raster and Enlightenment. It could be a fabrication, but what real reason would Raster have to lie?
I'll be honest here... I'm using RedHat 6.0. I disabled GNOME (with an almost silly amount of effort to do so) and am using Enlightenment DR15 like it was designed by Raster, without GNOME, and it hasn't crashed once. I pieced my computer together myself and I have not crashed with this setup yet without it being something _I_ did (we all do silly things sometimes). What I'm getting at is, Raster left for a very honest and honorable reason - he did not like the environment he was in. I say that he made a mature and wise decision. Granted, I am not impartial on this - I use Enlightenment, after all, and have since DR13. But I still think that Raster made the right decision, if it makes him happy.
Now all I'm worried about is RedHat. I seriously think they may have lost some direction. I don't worry about them dominating the market - we (the Linux community) would squash them if they tried. However, I do think that they are acting somewhat suspicious. I just wish SUSE6.1 had newer libraries *sigh*
Know ye not that ye are Gods???
Didn't Raster work on Enlightenment at Red Hat? I mean, it is all free software anyway, only Red Hat isn't paying for it. So Raster will end up doing what he would be doing at Red Hat anyway.
Of course Red Hat could direct what Raster was doing but...
Of course all my arguments are wrong if in fact Raster was hired for doing something else.
But lets say Alan Cox left, same work, no pay.
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Posted by phat5n00p3r:
Hey Rasterdude:
You've got total empathy from me, when it comes to bad management, and what they do to creative minds. However, that's a part of reality. It's good that you left RH, because their corporate culture, and your personality are a titanic clash. The guy who bore down hard on you has the unfortunate fate of not working with someone as talented as you.
You've got to understand one thing though. The "corporate" managers, who are nothing more than a pack of loud-mouth,annonying sales types, don't comprehend what Linux is all about. And the reality is that they never will. Their goal in life is to get a job, and get by through pretense, and managerial appeasement.
You are above that, and every decision you make, is always in your benefit. Best of luck in your endeavors, and thanks for the great work you've done.
phat5n00p3r@hushmail.com
Remember, we have not heard anything at all from "the who caused Raster to quit". In recent releases of Enlightenment, we have seen cool new features, like ripples, but still, when you "available space maximize" a window it slips over/under the Gnome panel. There seems to be *no* real documentation for Enlightenment's config files. RedHat was paying him for working on this and there are room for complaints. And as an Enlightenment/Gnome user, I feel a bit neglected here. I didn't need ripples. I do need true Gnome compliance in Enlightenment.
Puh-leaze!
It showed, if anything, that Red Hat has one dick manager Raster couldn't get along with. Have you worked a single day in the real world? Or are you sealed in some hermetic chamber that keeps all the bad people out?
People need to get some perspective.
Raster might be a fine programmer. Don't know, myself. Haven't looked at his code, wouldn't know much of what I was looking at. But he's one person who had a problem with one other person in a company.
To read the posts under this story, you'd think Raster had been staked to an anthill while Bob Young waved fists of money in his face and sodomized a blow up Linus doll to the cheers of blood-crazed GNOME partisans.
God almighty.
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, it does. It's horrible. Here's what happens:
You install Red Hat. You configure X. You use X, grumbling that you are forced to use only GNOME or (courtesy of another moron on Slashdot recently) a deliberately broken KDE.
As time goes by, you begin to notice something strange:
Windows you used to use a lot start getting the word 'My' appended to them... the solitaire that shipped with GNOME grows a 'Vegas Style' option... vi is replaced by edit... insipid screens tell you when it's ok to shut off the computer... any pixmaps of Tux on your system start morphing into a strangely familiar middle-aged looking guy with round glasses. When you test the sound configuration, instead of "Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux ... Linux" you get "Hello, this is Bill, Linus sucks dicks in hell."
One night, you go to sleep, troubled that your computer isn't working so well. As you sleep, a sleeper cron job fires up and dials Redmond. Linux is silently expunged from your hard drive, and the next morning you wake up to the Microsoft window banner on your screen.
In the distance, you think you hear Bob Young cackling as he orders a hit squad to find Raster, sleeping in his car somewhere on the Cali/Nevada line, and do him in before he can EXPOSE RED HAT AS A TOOL OF MICROSOFT!
Probably sounds plausible to you, doesn't it, you little nit?
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
[takes long bong hit]
No way man... don't you get it? Don't you see!? Red Hat already has enslaved us, dude!
[coughs, pounds chest]
See... in conjunction with the Bilderbergers and a dodecalateral cabal of moneyed interests working both in and outside of the Bretton Woods Compound (Antarctica... I've got photos), Red Hat built stuff into their install program. It doesn't use X because they can't get the same speed to hide the messages. And the messages are where it's at. KDE was deliberately broken to hide the messages.
[Second bong hit... more coughing...]
See, the message is the circle. And the circle is around the hat. We make the circle and the hat. Red? Stalin, dude. Hat? Circle... enclosed... imprisoned... enslaved.
See?
Raster just realized what was going on and got out. Too late, though. Red Hat's built incompatibilities that will cause Enlightenment to crash whenever you open an xterm so we'll be forced to use the GUI. Get it, man?
Once we're all GUI slaves, Red Hat turns us over to Microsoft. And we get enslaved by Sasquatch slavers from beyond the stars, taking their marching orders from Ramtha.
Totally.
[falls asleep face down in beanbag chair]
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
ack, that almost sounds like the windows registry. Whats wrong with splitting stuff up? Also SuSE does not release all their code under the GPL (YAST).
And after living in the Bay Area for awhile I can tell you: I'd much rather be in Durham than in Silicon Valley. That place is BO RING. No wonder so much coding gets done, there's *nothing* else to do.
YMMV
use slackware. Try out debian, its nice
If you want, people like that running business laughing taking your money and callling you a loser, that is your choice...
What makes you think the CEOs of Exxon, AT&T, Intel, or IBM are any more caring about their customers? No business (except for a REALLY small one) cares about anything except its bottom line. If being nice to customers gets you more money, fine. Otherwise, forget it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla... give me a break.
Awesome!
its not the programmers or the people who help them or the people who like their work, its the people who are ingrateful, whether they be programmer or user/marketer, they be ingrateful.
I'm not saying people should be grateful for those who have given so much time and energy to free software, but there is a fine line between giving thanks and giving worship. And, often that line gets crossed.
I'm particularly thankful for the work of Richard Stallman for his vision, and Linus for starting the project that alerted the masses to the philosophy of free software. But, even these two examples are still just people, and (probably) even aren't perfect, making bad decisions and all.
But, all the various free software "wars" (you know what I'm talking about) seem to indicate egos clashing. There are far too many pissing contests in this culture to believe in pure altrusim.
Besides, it's just software. None of us are curing cancer or feeding babies in Calcutta.
its not the programmers or the people who help them or the people who like their work, its the people who are ingrateful, whether they be programmer or user/marketer, they be ingrateful.
I'm not saying people should not be grateful for those who have given so much time and energy to free software, but there is a fine line between giving thanks and giving worship. And, often that line gets crossed.
I'm particularly thankful for the work of Richard Stallman for his vision, and Linus for starting the project that alerted the masses to the philosophy of free software. But, even these two examples are still just people, and (probably) even aren't perfect, making bad decisions and all.
But, all the various free software "wars" (you know what I'm talking about) seem to indicate egos clashing. There are far too many pissing contests in this culture to believe in pure altrusim.
Besides, it's just software. None of us are curing cancer or feeding babies in Calcutta.
Mandrake spoke at the last SVLUG meeting about E. He described how the modules worked to keep the core small. Don't like the module? Pop in another. In fact, if you eliminate the wallpaper, pick a theme without pixmaps, and keep those rgb icons out of there, Enlightenment is actually one of the smallest window managers around. I forget what he said the footprint was, but it was smaller than WindowMakers.
But half the fun of E is all those pixmaps, effects and modules!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The title may be a little blunt but it says what I'm going to say. First of all I know exactly where Raster is coming from having left a job under similar conditions. I personally feel that his idea of posting the story out was tacky and a chance to get back at this manager who he disliked so much. I agree with his reasons for not liking the guy and he truly may have wanted to strike back without hurting redhat (as he has claimed) but this can only hurt RedHat as a company. Everyone keeps posting about how we should be interested because this displays RH's feelings towards its userbase. This is not entirely true. Notice that he said it was this one person. I hope that Bob Young will have a nice sitdown with said employee and give him a reality check. I have a feeling Bob doesn't quite agree with this fellows attitude. At least I hope so. As for raster, this can't be a good job move because I know how i look at employee's who do this and how MY boss viewed it when I told him my story. All he needs to do is list RH on his resume. He doesnt have to use them for a reference. Besides that, there are probably a few other people there he could list other than the manager who, quite frankly seems not to care. As a side note, I read the articles and what not regarding this and I don't think it merits even discussing because it should be a personal issue. Raster is unintentionally (or intentionally) blackballing RH and it kind of makes him sound like a child for the whole issue. It probably would have been better dealt with on the e-user listserv. None the less, this is the joy of slashdot and life in general. Free Speach. =)
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Whats really the difference between having one file with many subsections and many subsections with one file. Im sure it would be possible to have the whole /etc contained in one database and have a /proc like interface, but I dont se the point.
The reason we are starting to see cracks in the community is because it is finally starting to become a community. And real communities have cracks. This is a Good Thing.
Before, Linux users were a club. They were predominantly hackers with similar goals and philosophies.
But new users arrived from all cultures. They have different goals and different philosophies. The don't all think that Richard is the high priest or that Linus is the master pragmatician. Most will never learn the intricacies of vi or emacs. This is the way real communities are.
We don't get to choose our neighbors. Our candidate for mayor rarely gets elected. We go to different churches. Someone always complains about the potholes, and someone else complains about the cost to clean them up.
If my community were perfect, I'd move to someplace where there were cracks!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is terribly ironic, considering that article a few weeks back about RedHat trying to hire the "Superstars of Linux programming". Well, Raster may not be the Michael Jordan of Linux, but I think he could be the Kurt Cobain of Linux.
Kurt Cobain, if you recall, is the late lead singer/songwriter/guitarist of the revolutionary early 90's band Nirvana. He pushed his genre of music into new directions. He wasn't Mozart, but he wasn't bad either.
Raster is somewhat similar to this. He takes his genre, the window manager, and pushes it to new extremes. He makes up new rules (e.g., Imlib) along the way. He's not doing anything radically new, but what he does is still cool.
Finally, if you want to impress a Windows user, you don't show them TWM, you show them Enlightenment.
Crypt.X
They are honest? So why do they sue you in 50 states on the same day when you just put up a webpage telling about their practices?
And they DO actively seek you out. They grab peopl e from the streets and make them do tests that invariably show that expensive courses are required. Once you have entered such a course it's not easy to get out.
Damn... is Bob Young really one of those?
How can this post get a 3?, This is just personal oppinions and no facts. Why wouldn't a person who generates great but experimental code fit with people who can fix it up?. Why say he is being childish then one of the managers was an asshole, I whold get very angry to hear bad remarks of me and my code and the users of my programs for 1.5 years so whats so wrong with that?
If everyone just wrote code and made it work at least GNOME would evolve faster...
De lyckliga slavarna är frihetens bittraste fiender, legalisera!!!
As a KDE supporter, let me be the first to offer my apologies for the rude behavior of another KDE user (abuser?).
The vast majority of KDE users respect GNOME. Many use KDE on top of E. A lot use both KDE and GNOME together. Please do not get the impression that this is the typical behavior of KDE types.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I'm not really up to date on what Raster's feelings are regarding Gnome. I do know that they work wonderfully together under Redhat and I wonder if Raster's split from RH will hamper the Gnome/Enlightenment relationship. From what I read in his departure recap I felt some vibes like the gnome-enlightenment partnership was one of Redhat's ambitions and not necesarrily one of his own. Does anyone know more about Enlightenment's future plan with Gnome and if they have changed at all with Raster's resignation?
Whatever happended to the neatly typed letter stating I'm leaving for a better opportunity?
If you were really unreplaceable, and only a few of us are, the people above your manager will need explanations. When you write a letter like this, the easy explanation, that the guy was smart but couldn't get along with people, is easily believable.
It is obvious his coworkers didn't care much for his feelings, so why would they care now? Doesn't he have the emotional intelligence to figure that out?
I'm going to move to RTP, love that pulled pork barbecue. Let Rasterman go to SanFran, maybe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are more his style.
Look at it from the company's point of view. Foremost, it's bad press right before their IPO. Second, it hurts their recruiting efforts by saying that living in NC sucks...
I dunno, maybe even a vague loyalty isn't something that HR people look for anymore, but it's something I still value in people who work for me.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Posted by stodge:
He's just another developer leaving another company. So he has public visibility purely because its RedHat. So what? These things happen every day. Get used to it and get on with your life.
If you hadn't worked out by now, the longer and bitter the slanging match, the uglier it gets. The more you bitch and swap public responses, the lower you go in my esteem. Its a sad cliche, but let your code do the talking.
In our attempts to find a "moral to the story," we can basically try to answer two questions: What does this say about Rasterman? and What does this say about Red Hat? If you don't like my longwindedness, I'll answer both for you right here: nothing.
The only change to Rasterman that arises from this is a different locale and different employer. That's it. He always has cared about his users; he's not leaving because he's been magically enlightened to the needs of them. Same ol' lovable Rasterman.
Likewise, there's nothing new about Red Hat here. They aren't out to hurt Rasterman's users or work, with the exception of one person. I doubt one person should categorize Red Hat's official stance. Especially one which has thus far gone unnamed, and is more than likely not anyone high on the food chain. Rasterman himself even says that most of the folks and RH and RHAD are good people: there's just that one person who has offended him.
So why am I chatting so much about something that I consider a nothing-new event? Simply because I don't want to hear any weirdness emerge from it. Rasterman is not suddenly a saint (unless he already was ;) ); Red Hat is not suddenly a non-believer in the Free way.
Flames burn. Hurt. Don't touch; don't start.
What's wrong with it is that he has one. Seems very childish. None of the really big free software developers have one. All of the script kiddies have one.
I've never kept working at a place that thinks it can treat me like trash. I deserve more respect than that, and so did Raster. :), and he did not want to work there anymore. Plain and simple. Why should he be RH's slave when others will pay him to work in a supportive environment?
Loyalty is earned. If that loyalty is betrayed, it deserves to be taken away.
If you get paid to write software, you want a productive environment to work in, to do good work, to deliver your product, and the management should support those who are working for them. The better you treat your workers, espicially with this type of product development, the better work they do. Plain logic. Red Hat's management gave raster trouble, made the environment bad (besides, NC SUCKS!
Human beings are incredible assets. Human resources fit under operating expenses.
Well said.
I use E, and I admire both these guys' work.
I'd respect them even more if they stopped acting like rock stars and kept their professional difficulties to themselves, like mature professionals do.
I do hope that "professionalism", if that word applies to Open Source and Free Software, and discipline will come to grace the Linux community at some time. Show a little class and deal with your problems in private.
"Stunt Programmer" - I love that expression.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
As someone who just gave his notice today at a 21000 person company to join a startup, I can understand wanting to vent, but as the cliche says "discretion is the better part of valor".
You don't know what tomorrow brings, and not only burning bridges, but stomping on the smoulering ashes probably isn't the best tactic when leaving a company.
Perhaps it's one of the dangers of instant communication, this ability to instantly blow off steam without anything forcing you to cool down and rethink. Or maybe the infamous programmer temperment combined with this "cult of personality" surrounding the Linux celebrities is pumping egos out of control.
Maybe what's driving the whole free software movement isn't a noble belief in freedom for users, but is instead the chance to have your sense of self-worth blown completely out of porportion with reality.
That manager was soooooo right. Folks like you just keep proving it.
oooh, let's see how deep we can take this. We are all so very clever.
Welp, the fileselector applet he wants is so people can load backgrounds a lot easier more than anything, it's a long way from becoming an actual desktop shell. However, raster is interested in that. It's hard to say what he wants first. E2.0 was supposed to not only be the window manager, but a window manager and window system. He's changed that plan a little.... but I won't spoil it for ya'll. :)
Heh heh just like Elvis...
"I saw him on the Angel Island Ferry!!!"
Where _will_ he pop up next...?
Raster wants to do Stunt Programming, death-defying, convention-breaking, high-bandwidth stuff. Redhat has always been about cleaning up Linux for institutional, mainstream consumption. It wasn't a great fit. It's good that he's moved on, though he's been mighty childish and unprofessional about it.
JWZ is also a Stunt Programmer. On the Mozilla project, he was given marching orders to be a project leader, not a Stunt Programmer. The Mozilla project faltered. He left, frustrated. Since then, the Mozilla project has become much more goal-focused, its frequent milestone releases coming with clear goals. The difference is like night and day, reflected in everything from the crisp, punctual status reports and the daily inventories of showstoppers.
The successor to NS Communicator is still a long way from release, but the new discipline evident across the board on the Mozilla project shows how much dithering there was in the absence of strong project leadership.
This Raster guy and that Zawinski fella have done damn fine stuff, and have plenty of damn fine stuff ahead of them. But both were ill-suited to the jobs they were in, and should stop bellyaching.
Linux community downhill fast? Socially speaking it was a matter of time once Boot magazine stuck a distro on one of their discs saying Linux was for 'rebels.'
What I was implying?
Not that use of something other than Debian is hypocricy. It's cool among all the little trendoids to dis Red Hat for everything from deliberately breaking KDE to make GNOME look good to 'trying to make Linux like Windows', and after a while, no matter how much you know better, you get sick of hearing about it from the little nits.
Where's that put our erstwhile Commander? About where he might as well be. Now that he's free of the taint of Red Hat, he'll have no compulsion against running every moronic screed that comes across his screen, provided it's written by either a.) a Linux rock star or b.) another clown who thinks his writing style is scholarly and insightful when it's really just half-assed conjecture that could just as easily support the claim that Linus is a Venusian sent to usher in the new millenium with alien crash-proofing technology.
I'm sure Mr. Malda is a nice guy, but I suspect his capacity for critical reading is minimal, and if I had to accuse him of anything, it would be 'being impressionable.' To get back to what I was implying, I suppose I should have said something like:
I'm sure he's been getting crap like this for a long time now. I'm also sure that since he's human, and since among Linux geeks an attack on one's distro is a smudge upon one's very escutcheon, he's been unwilling to post stories about how the distribution he relies on to work sucks and is evil and doesn't care about the users and is just like Microsoft and blah blah god-damn blah. Now, continuing on with my flashback to what I should have said he doesn't run Red Hat. He runs Debian. The crap about Red Hat continues to pump from the keyboards of the distro poseurs and pseudo-scholars with their paranoid and delusional tongue gnawings, and it continues to show up in the submission bin. But Mr. Malda doesn't need to worry about that anymore. He is a Debian man now. And he owes it to the community to let us all know what people are saying out there.
High user number to the contrary, I remember an earlier time as well. It doesn't matter and there's no going back. Demented people are afoot, clutching their tattered self-images to their breasts, hoping a fucking operating system, of all things, will serve to define them in the face of a world of people who (revelation time for someone out there) don't give a damn about their preferences in computer tools. In the 'good old days,' all you had to say was 'I run Linux.'
Lots of people would squirm and think of other things they had to do, but by God, a Linux man was a Linux man.
Sadly, that time has passed. It just isn't good enough to be a Linux man because there are too damned many of them. How to differentiate ourselves? Well... the next logical step is the distro. And after that... the desktop environment. And on, and on, and on.
-Insinkerator
The sig is sarcasm, by the way, in case you missed that the first time.
Make sure you flaunt which distro you run... it's the only way we have to judge you as a person.
I know Linux supporters can rattle off high-profile Linux stories (Titanic rendering, a number of research clustering projects, possibly Corel's NetWinder, etc), as if somehow that imbues Linux in general with something approaching professionalism, but they lack the depth and breadth of the kind of stories that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others can lay before prospective PHBs.
If anything, Rasterman comes off looking like some spoiled script kiddie who got lucky at RedHat and then threw a fit and quit when things didn't go his way. If Rasterman really wanted to help, he'd think beyond his own wounded ego to the rest of the community. And perhaps the Linux community, if they really want to be looked on as professional-like, should be more selective on whom they bestow fame and cachet.
Based on his writings, Rasterman is an illiterate moron. Based on his design for Enlightenment, he's a creative genius. I think the reason many of us care enough to read and write on this topic is that we recognize this genius, and therefore wish Rasterman well.
:-(.
I know that people with this kind of genius can be very shy when not around their kind, and I think this explains a lot of what happened. Then things just fester until they suddenly appear as they have here.
I do wonder if some of this is out of a desire to move to the Bay Area, however. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he could have easily fixed up his differences at Red Hat. He didn't like North Carolina, so it was time to go.
Can't say I blame him, although he's likely to find housing prices up there a rude shock
D
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Who are you to decide what's /. material? Moderation is for keeping the me too first post and such shit out. And if you haven't noticed Rob doesn't post everything that hits the submit story link. So chill.
Personally I'd like to know the character of the people I support with my money.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
It's like that cuz we buy products from people who form a group call it a body and forget to give it a heart or a head. The upshot is in the end it's not under their control anymore. Stock holders and venture capitalists are holding a gun to their heads.
Wait, so then capitalism IS decentralized... and they said open source wouldn't work.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)